Talked about on today’s show:
One of the last Guy de Maupassant stories, fantasy podcasts, what genre is this story?, the mysterious, the macabre, the morbid, do we buy the narrator’s story?, Am I Insane? by Guy de Maupassant, the events that happen are insane, a horror story?, a satire of Gothic horror, it is a ridiculous premise, a mental institution, is he lying?, is he deluded?, the servants, very thorough thieves, the title, Maupassant is intentionally ambiguous, there’s always a grain of the opposite, a syphilitic brain crafts a masterful short story, is it a true-ish story?, Maupassant was kind of a loner, boating among other things, Maupassant liked his solitude, touring all the European cities, THE SIGN OF DEATH PRECEDES STRANGE EVENTS, “several hours”, if the furniture is taking the place of other people…, affection for objects, The Golden Braid (aka The Tress Of Hair), falling in love with an object, the writing desk and its contents, where did the writing desk go?, his letters his papers, his personal history is now gone, deracinate , visiting new places, the history of his heart, the photographs, his emotional life, the furniture is the mental faculties, the house is him,

“Then I suddenly discerned, on the threshold of my door, an armchair, my large reading easy-chair, which set off waddling [LIKE A DUCK]. It went away through my garden. Others followed it, those of my drawing-room, then my sofas, dragging themselves along like [CROCODILES] on their short paws; then all my chairs, bounding like [GOATS], and the little foot-stools, hopping like [RABBITS].”

his desk is like a wife who’s trying to run away, the repeated refrains, “imagine my feelings”, you stop being the reader and become a participant, the revolver, marauders, the doors are alive too, Rouen, his arms were there, gun nuts, the presentiments, the river Robec, the black nauseous waters, the second hotel scene mirrors the first, is the hotel an asylum, you found your mental faculties, he checks himself in (to the hotel and the asylum), are you a private gentleman?, is the asylum is a prison?, the fat bald little yellow bearded man from Rouen with a head like a moon, grammatically it doesn’t make sense, ambiguity, THE MOON, the witch’s sabbath crescent, the play “beautiful music and fairy life drama”, he’s had a spell cast on him, “a serious accident would certainly take place”, a paralytic stroke, the sound from outside his body, a humming, trains passing, clocks, marching multitudes, “the big one”, the crescendo, “Signad” in Swedish means “designed”, Sigurd, the ring cycle, dwarves, fantasy and reality mixing, were the cops playing along?, “this house communicates with it’s neighbors”, very weird, Jesse’s tweeted dream explanation: “Dreamt an explanation for WHO KNOWS? By Guy de Maupassant – the furniture was deleted, & their dissolution was confabulated.”, not a psychological interpretation, an ontological interpretation, accidentally deleting something, SimCity, ctrl-z, not a useful miracle, an incompetent higher power, “My god, my god”, “Merciful heaven”, no grudge against, Who knows?, God knows!, a murderous schoolteacher, Revenge by Guy de Maupassant, a higher power that deletes, the short story is the only form that can be perfect, there’s something perfect, any lacuna, “a missing section of text”, the oxymoron, rude gentleness, an unbalanced situation, the insane sanity or the sane insanity, the widow Bidoin,

“He ordinarily passes his evenings at the house of a female neighbor, who is also a furniture broker, a queer sort of sorceress, the widow Bidoin”

is she married to the bald man, that Disney movie, maybe it isn’t a perfect short story, etymological searches, the tour of Africa, Sicily, Normandy, “where there hover no vague hauntings”, the missing night, a different sort of desert, Fear by Guy de Maupassant, “I had a presentiment in Africa”, “the sun dissipates it like a fog”, fear vs. panic, the spiritual gnawing of northern cultures, The Inn by Guy de Maupassant, H.P. Lovecraft, “God is dead but he never really was alive. The universe is real but we’re alone in it. Looking up at the starry night we are pointless, alone, with nothingness behind us, nothingness ahead of us, and its horrible.” he goes crazy because he’s alone, in the tumult of the crowd (with it’s light pollution), “there’s a shop for that down the street”, very very very small and unimportant, Lovecraft made it a monster, Eric S. Rabkin, light as the symbol for knowledge, inside the interesting chest cavity, a cosmic vastness and emptiness in which we are lost, solitude, Rouen, Rotomagus (round market or round plain) – but the word magus, J.R.R. Tolkien’s dwarves, great craftsmen, is the man from Roen really God?, yesterday I was in a private asylum, three months, a descent into madness, is there no lacuna in the inflexible sequence of his observations, a lacuna in which the end took place.

The horrors of medieval witchery in rural France! Hear Mr. Jim Moon narrate the “darkly erotic” Mother Of Toads, originally censored in its Weird Tales publication, Mr. Jim Moon reads it in its “full uncut glory.”

Mother Of Toads
By Clark Ashton Smith; Read by Mr. Jim Moon
1 |MP3| – Approx. 1 Hour 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Hypnobobs
Podcast: January 27, 2013Weird and powerful was the effect on the young apprentice of the potion given him by Mere Antoinette, known by the villagers as “the Mother of Toads.” First published in Weird Tales, July 1938.

Here’s a |PDF| made from the censored version that appeared in Weird Tales.

Do you like really sad short stories? I promise this one will do the job.

In fact it may just be the saddest short story ever written.

I summarized it in SFFaudio Podcast #194, and then recently told it to my friend Julie Hoverson. She was taken with it, and has now kindly narrated it for us!

What I love about this recording is the genuine emotion, prompted by the story’s end, that comes into Julie’s voice for those final lines. That’s not acting! That’s the real stuff!

And if you listen closely enough you may even hear the sound of teardrops sliding down flushed cheeks – though if they are coming from Julie – or from you – may be somewhat hard to determine.

Miss Brill
By Katherine Mansfield; Read by Julie Hoverson
1 |MP3| – Approx. 14 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Provider: Julie Hoverson
Provided: January 2013Miss Brill, an English teacher working in France, lives in a small room near the Jardains Publique. Every Sunday she visits the gardens and listens to the music of the band, admires the attire of her fellow park-goers, and eavesdrops on their conversations. First published in Athenaeum, November 26, 1920.

If I had to name the one story that’s influenced my reading, and thinking, most in last couple of years I’d name The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. It possesses my mind like a dark and deep tunnel running through my imaginative landscape – if you haven’t heard it yet you should. Below you’ll find my preferred version, but there are more readings, and adaptations HERE – and we did a whole podcast about it, that’s HERE.

One new thing though is this |PDF| which I made from a scan of an issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries – it features the 1911 George Allan England translation.

Although this 1975 radio drama adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders In The Rue Morgue drops much of the material of the original short story, adds new characters, and a new subplot, I’m pleased to say I really, really liked it.

If you had any difficulty getting into the recent podcast audiobook of the original story, SFFaudio Podcast #179, you’ll likely love how accessible this CBS Radio Mystery Theater adaptation is.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater #0198 – The Murders In The Rue Morgue
Adapted from the story by Edgar Allan Poe; Adapted by George Lowthar; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 44 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: CBS Radio
Broadcast: January 7, 1975
Source: CBSRMT.comA woman is brutally murdered and mutilated in a locked room. A police detective desperate for promotion calls on an amateur detective to help him solve the crime with a most unusual solution.

The Murders In The Rue Morgue
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Reynard T. Fox
1 |M4B|, 3 Zipped MP3s or Podcast – Approx. 1 Hour 34 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 30, 2007
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841. Poe referred to it as a “tale of ratiocination” featuring the brilliant deductions of C. Auguste Dupin; it is today regarded as one of the first detective stories and is almost certainly the first locked room mystery.”
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